Manuscripts and Melodies: Tracing Linguistic Expressions across Africa and Asia
Arabic in West Africa and East Asia
Friday, June 13, 2025
16:15 - 18:00 GMT
Location: LNB-27B
Presenter(s)
HZ
Hongwei Zhang
Shanghai International Studies University, China (People's Republic)
Paper Abstract: Although originally confined to Arabia, both the Arabic language and script reached a vast geographical area across the globe as a result of the expansion of the Islamic empires and the spread of the Islamic religion and culture. In West Africa, the derived Ajami script was adopted for various non-Semitic languages centuries before the European colonial rule. Similarly in East Asia, both Sinitic and Turkic was historically rendered in derived Arabic scripts: the Hui people devised Xiao’erjin to record non-standard Chinese while the Turkic peoples such as the Uyghurs inherited the established Chagatai tradition. This paper examines the parallel situations and aims at analyzing the similarities and differences of: (1) the interactions between the Semitic/Arabic language and writing with the non-Semitic local languages, (2) the subsequent writing shifts which took place in both regions, and (3) the aftermath of the shifts and the curious maintenance of the heritage writing systems. The paper also highlights the unnecessity of representational adequacy for a writing system (especially for native speakers), and emphasizes the script’s importance in terms of cultural heritage and identity.
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